Braver Leadership: Mental Fitness for Age of AI

"Vision is the ultimate source of all leadership. Optimism is vision girded for battle. Optimism can be a shape-shifting and protean force, moving like water past all obstacles, breaking a path of love, expressed in courage."  James Strock In this episode we explore the power of optimism within your leadership style. Associated with greater engagement, creativity and productivity it'...

How does it feel to be a leader when those around you may be smarter? Threatening or liberating? This is the critical inflection point in leadership. From your role as giving out directions through instruction to creating direction through listening and asking smarter questions. In this episode we look at Power Listening and how practicing this technique can encourage people to bring their best to...

It used to be that the most senior people in the organisation were the most experienced, knowledgeable and smartest. But these days people have side-hustles, have worked in multiple organisations, are board members of not-for-profits, run their own businesses. Surveys show workers have a range of secret skills that never get used in their workplace. This episode explores the concept of the talent...

Welcome to another season of Thriving Leader. Season 4 is all about the 4th quadrant of the Energy Leadership model and we're talking catalytic leadership - your ability to generate energy within others so you create that all important multipler effect. As the first episode this is an introduction to why cataylytic leadership is all important and indeed almost the only leadership game in town...

Episode 14 and last in the season on Connective Energy and it would be odd to do a whole season on how to connect without mentioning LinkedIn. I resisted this for a while because people write whole books on LinkedIn so what can I add. Well in this episode I'll focus a bit on how to use LinkedIn sincerely from the point of view of leveraging Connective Energy of others. Lots of books have focus...

Welcome to episode 13 of season 3 we're still working on developing our connective energy. In this episode I look at the top down command and control leadership style questioning how effective it is in a world where we want to grasp information, insight and connection through porous borders. By contrast I'll be looking at leading as a Neighbourhood Mayor, mastering multiple constituencies...

So far in this season we’ve looked at Connective energy and the value to be gained in terms of energy from forging alliances with others. Just making the ask are you curious, are you willing to explore further will immediately bring your connections and energy you didn’t have before. Despite your awesome connective energy skills there comes a time when things just don’t seem to gel, you’re making...

When you’re seeking to leverage connective energy the number one rule is to be yourself. There are two (at least) good reasons for this. Firstly that trying to be someone else or trying to emulate someone else’s character or behaviour is endlessly exhausting and takes and huge amount of energy that should be focussed on building the relationship not holding a constant mask. The second is that if y...

If we head back to the 70s, 80s even 90s, the art of connecting was something still done in clubs, largely men-only as best as they could get away with it, or the golf course, again at the time a male bastion. Everything behind closed doors. Zip forwards at least thirty years and it’s true that some things have not changed but as Judy Rabinett points out; women have stepped into greater leadership...

Introverts have a well-established “too much” radar which needs to balance taking on information with processing and digesting.  Whereas extroverts tend to think through talking, introverts need peace to be able to really think.  And therefore when it comes to stepping into one of those big hotel rooms (you know the ones with the weird carpet designs than seem reserved only for big hotel...

Honesty’s a tough cookie to crack in relationships. There are some who believe you should always be honest no matter what the consequence. Yet extreme honesty uninvited can wreck and ruin relationships. Few people set out to be dishonest in their connections and yet they withhold things they’re less happy with, pull punches on feedback and through this mislead their connections into believing thin...

No matter how flat you make a pancake, it’s still got two sides. Dr Phil Whenever we’re trying to forge a connection, it’s easy for us to go out imagining our pancake has only one side, the one we are interested in, and interested in promoting. That’ll get us so far in forging connections, but only so far. When we incorporate different points of view, those differences can be mild alternative...

I do not take well to the word fail. Recently someone introduced me to another way of looking at the word instead seeing FAIL as “First attempt in learning”. That works better for me. We all make mistakes. What matters is what we do with the experience. When it comes to building connective energy people tend to make surprisingly similar steps that don’t exactly help the process...

“Let your hook be always cast, in the pool where you least expect it there will be fish”, Ovid In this episode we look at fostering links and connections.   You may think the strategy is to harvest more connections endlessly or boost up the strong ones and kick out the weaker links.  But I'm going to challenge that directly.  In this episode we look at all the advantages some o...

“As a leader of a growing team or company, the single most important thing you can do is ensure your success is to invest in building a culture of givers” Adam Grant, Give and Take. Networking is one of those words that brings a sense of horror and dread for some and yet for others it appears to come easy. There is some truth in networking being easier as you get a little older, not necessarily be...

Be someone who listens and you will be heard. It's a simple motto and it's what we explore in this episode.  Often when we try to bond with people our heads are so swamped with our own agenda we're not really in listening mode.  Yet we know how fundamentally empowering and valuing it is when we ourselves are heard and listened to. We explore the power of this form of listening and some t...

Dale Carnegie said “A person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” Names matter. The sound of your name cuts through any background noise, we’re conditioned from birth to hear it above anything else. It makes us unique, special and said in the right tone, valued. Remember someone’s name and you’re indicating their importance to you. Get it wrong and don’t...

Hey welcome back to Season 3 of the Thriving Leader.  This season with 13 episodes was researched and recorded over the summer of 2022 to be released during the autumn / fall of 22. Connective Energy is the third part of the energy leader model.  Like the other quadrants it's an important one and it represents out ability to get more things done by combining our energy with the resources...

Many of us tend to think in a linear fashion or were raised on project management principles of define scope, develop, execute etc. and yet the creatives and inventors that we most admire rarely worked in that way. The challenge with a linear process is that it is inherently reductive - the goal is to tightly define an objective and then strip back extraneous detail until something definite is del...

If you allow this to happen - you are the greatest barrier to your own creative talents.  All to often our concerns and hang ups that we're not as good as others, that people will laugh at us, that we're not worthy, qualified or smart enough to contribute means we stay silent. When we stay silent we not only deprive the world of the good that's in our thoughts, but because ideas spark off oth...

Often we feel intimidated by creativity - the blank sheet of paper, the pressure to come up with something new.  But this is really pressure we needlessy put on ourselves.  Most of the world's best inventions came from additive thinking, recognising something out there already and improving upon it.  In this podcast episode I give you a couple of ways to bring additive thinking into...

when we were around five years of age we were awesome questioners.  If we wanted to understand something we just made the ask, why, but why and but why.  And then as we move into school and start being told there are facts, unquestionable facts we acquire a sense that our role is to absorb and accept realities presented by others.  And then we transition into the workplace complete...

Beliefs are powerful things, they build through our childhood, reinforced in adulthood to the point where we can't remember why we see the world a certain way - why for example we are not creative.  In this episode I'm opening up the notion that creativity can take many forms and that often people are creative in one dimension e.g. outside work but not creative inside work.  This gives s...

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less”, General Eric Schineski.  Often when faced with the task of creativity it feels better to stay as we are in the safe harbour.  In reality out on the high seas are people who had the courage to set sail and they're not waiting for you.  In this episode we look at the cost of a safety first principle and challenge...

At school we were all told the story of Isaac Newton. He sat one day under the shade of an apple tree and at one point the apple fell on his head and he more or less instantly discovered and was able to identify that the moon isn’t falling to the earth and the earth isn’t falling into the sun and in short articulate the theory of gravity that rests with us today. Marvellously convenient, except of...